The Emotional Tsunami

Why leadership feels so heavy—and how to reclaim clarity

No one talks about the emotional weight of leadership. But it’s real—and it’s heavy.

If I had a dollar for every time a school leader told me, “I just feel like I’m holding everything together all the time,” I’d be funding school transformation globally. What they’re talking about isn’t time management, and it’s not workload. It’s emotional weight.

And not the dramatic kind—the daily, quiet, cumulative kind:

• A staff member who confides they’re not coping
• A parent who unloads years of frustration on your voicemail
• A student situation you carry home in your chest, not your briefcase

And somehow, you’re still expected to show up composed, strategic, and responsive. Not because the job demands emotional intelligence—but because the system offloads emotional labour without naming it.

Leadership isn’t just strategic. It’s emotional—and unacknowledged.

This was a thread running through both Leadership in Triage and Glorifying Overwork: That what schools reward is often not strategy, but survival. This article looks at what happens when the load becomes invisible, but still expected.

When emotional composure becomes the default requirement, even as your internal capacity thins, I call it the emotional tsunami. Why? Because it doesn’t knock you down in one wave. Instead, it pulls you out, inch by inch—until one day, you realise you’ve drifted too far from yourself.

What helps isn’t just more resilience. It’s recognising three truths I see the most grounded leaders live by.

Truth 1: You’re not weak for feeling heavy

Field example: The “too sensitive” principal

One principal I worked with—a deeply thoughtful leader—told me quietly after a coaching session: “Maybe I’m just not built for this. I care too much. Everything lands.” What she meant was this:

• She felt responsible for every staff conflict
• She carried unresolved student grief
• She lost sleep over her own team’s wellbeing

And not once in her training was this part of the job described—yet it shaped every day. This is emotional labour in leadership: not just being aware of others’ emotions, but feeling responsible for them.

This isn’t weakness. It’s leadership without insulation.

What schools reward is often not strategy, but survival.

Maslach and Leiter (2016) describe burnout as the result of chronic emotional demand without offsetting recognition, recovery, or resource. That’s what this principal was experiencing—not fragility, but accumulation. She didn’t need a thicker skin. What she needed was space, boundaries, and a place to be supported—not just supportive.

Truth 2: Calm isn’t the goal—clarity is

Field example: The composed regional leader

In one system I consult with, I met a regional leader praised for being calm under pressure. She absorbed everything: staff anxieties, parental anger, department expectations. She stayed composed, always. But her internal world? It was in quiet chaos. She later admitted, “I was so focused on being calm, I never questioned whether I should be involved in half of it.”

This is what happens when calm becomes a performance rather than a tool. Calm without clarity is just emotional containment. You’re holding everything—but discerning nothing. Clarity, by contrast, gives you choices:

• What requires my attention?
• What’s not mine to solve?
• Where am I absorbing when I should be guiding?

Brown (2021) calls this the difference between “emotional boundaries” and “emotional overfunctioning.” We don’t need leaders who are calm at all costs. We need leaders who are clear about what costs too much.

Truth 3: You don’t need to bounce back—you need to breathe

Field example: The hallway ritual

A principal I know created a simple practice: Every day at 2:45pm, she walked the longest hallway in her school—alone, five minutes, no phone. When I asked why, she said: “It’s the only time I’m not carrying someone else’s crisis.”

That’s the paradox of modern leadership: We train leaders to be “resilient”—but we give them no space to recover.

No one talks about the emotional weight of leadership. But it’s real—and it’s heavy.

Leithwood et al. (2020) found that leaders who had even small, consistent recovery rhythms showed significantly higher wellbeing and decision clarity. This principal wasn’t escaping. She was resetting.

Bouncing back is what we tell people to do when we can’t redesign the demands. Breathing is what we choose to do to lead intentionally. You don’t need a full day off. You need five minutes of ownership—every day—where your nervous system remembers that you’re not just here to manage stress; you’re here to lead beyond it.

You Were Never Meant to Carry It All

The emotional tsunami isn’t a dramatic breakdown. It’s the erosion of leadership presence through quiet accumulation. And the system rarely notices—until it’s too late. But here’s what I keep coming back to: You weren’t hired to be a sponge for dysfunction. You’re here to lead something better than that.

That begins with naming the weight. And then choosing, every day, what’s actually yours to carry. Because the school doesn’t need you to be calm all the time. It needs you to be clear. Present. Boundaried. Real.

You don’t lead better by being tougher. You lead better by being clearer. And clarity begins with breathing between the waves.

Reclaim Your Leadership Clarity

This is the kind of conversation we’re having in the Professional Wellness Workshop—a free space I’ve created for school leaders who want to lead with clarity, strength, and long-term capacity.

When you register, you’ll also receive an advance copy of my new book:

Culture of Excellence: The Path to Empowered Teaching, Inspired Learning, and Intentional Leadership

What helps you manage the emotional weight of leadership—without losing yourself in it?

References

Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.

Leithwood, K., Azah, V. N., Harris, T., Slater, C., & Jantzi, D. (2020). Principal leadership and teacher wellbeing: The role of trust, equity, and capacity. Educational Administration Quarterly, 56(5), 746–784. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X20952858

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Burnout: A multidimensional perspective. In R. J. Burke & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), The fulfilling workplace: The organization’s role in achieving individual and organizational health (pp. 77–96). Routledge.